


But Not For Me

by sterileflcwer



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001), Band of Brothers (TV 2001) RPF
Genre: It took me almost a year to write this, Lot's of family trauma, Mentions of religion, Mostly just a self indulgent fic, PTSD, Talks about war trauma, brief mention of death, generally kinda dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 17:07:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30142797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sterileflcwer/pseuds/sterileflcwer
Summary: "David attempted to act like parts of him hadn’t been destroyed in front of his comrades. In one of her letters, Ann had quoted a Bible passage about forgiveness. Of course, it was easy to forgive when her biggest enemies were yelling toddlers and husbands who hated going to dance halls. It was easy to act like the saint his sister portrayed herself to be when she hadn’t seen the worst of humanity."
Kudos: 6





	But Not For Me

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I hope y'all enjoy this fic! I started writing this about two months into COVID and now it's a year. It took me a good couple of months to write this. All of this to say, I hope this is an enjoyable read for y'all! :)

“I’ve found more clouds of grey,  
Than any Russian play could guarantee.”

When David Webster had gotten home from Europe, he immediately went to continue his education at Harvard. That way, he would be able to get his foot in the door at a newspaper, one that people outside of the town he went to prep school in would actually read. Something that was known nation-wide. A paper where people would know and care about his name. People cared about his last name, sure, but not about anything else about him. They liked him because people knew that his parents had money. But they couldn’t give less of a shit about what he actually wrote.

In 1947, he graduated with his degree in literature. Of course, his father complained at the dinner table that the “piece of shit paper” was a “waste of good money”, but David still was proud of himself. He cherished the badly beaten copy of The Sun Also Rises that one of his professors had given him during his first year at Harvard. In fact, he carried it everywhere still. He would occasionally skim through it on quiet afternoons. Not because he was attempting to unlock some secret Hemingway had laid in the text for him, but simply because it brought him comfort. Of course, his parents thought it rather odd. It was just some copy he had been given because he had lost his own, what was so special about some book that seemed to have no point other than to chronicle an idealized version of Hemingway’s life? But, to David, it had this odd magic to it. If he were ever to lose it, another copy of the book, no matter how alike, would never replace it. No new copy bought straight from a shelf could replace the dog eared pages and the coffee stain on page 61. Even if the same professor were to give him another, similarly beaten copy, it would never be as enchanted.

On his first date after the war, he went out with a girl who had been in his Russian literature class. They went out to a small cafe on the campus, simply getting a coffee together and attempting to avoid any formalities. Neither of them wanted something fancy. Most people of their generation had started to despise extremely luxurious things. After all, most of their earliest memories were ones where they were starving through the Depression and their parents losing their jobs. Plus, many had moved to big cities with their families when they were rather young in hopes of being able to find better employment opportunities than odd jobs in small towns did.

During their date, the young woman had revealed that her favorite novel was Little Women, as she had been given a copy at a young age. Though she had lost the copy, she still cherished the story for what it had carried her through. She was able to quote off full passages with how many times she had read it in her two decades on this earth. David felt his heart skip a beat, thinking that he had found a kindred spirit in this young woman. Though, they had ended up not working out. Still, David cherished how she had made his heart skip a beat at first and how he felt discussing literature with her.

As he was starting to prepare for his graduation, he picked up The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri. He didn’t particularly have a reason to pick it up, just thinking that it was something he should read. When he had settled down in his dorm that night after finishing all of his assignments, he opened the book and started to just skim through it to make sure he was interested enough in it to read it. It made him remember when his oldest brother, Frank, had graduated from medical school, when David was eight. Still, he was brought along on the family trip to Italy. Frank had brought along a copy of the first part of The Divine Comedy-- The Inferno to read on the long journey. When he had finished it, he had bartered at a bookshop in Siena for a copy of the second book, Purgatorio, of the three. Of course, he had done it in perfect Italian. Frank was always the favorite of the Webster’s five children, the apple of his parents’ eyes. He was followed by Ann, 23, Lillias, 21, and John, 16. David had been a surprise, following the son that was supposed to be the last by eight years. And even though he was the baby of the family, that didn’t mean he didn’t have to compete with his siblings. Maybe that’s why he had gone too far out on that vacation, and needed for Frank to rescue him from being pulled out so far that nothing could save him. And of course, instead of his parents doting on him and worrying about their son that they had come very close to losing, they celebrated Frank. In fact, they had gone out to a dinner that night to celebrate Frank and had simply left David at the hotel.

Six years later, when he entered high school at the Taft School, David really wanted to prove himself. Both Frank and John had attended the school and were well loved by the professors that had taught them, even years later. Of course, David couldn’t escape the comparisons to his talented brothers and was often questioned how the two were doing. Frank was growing close to the end of his residency at Georgetown Hospital and John was preparing for his first year of law school at Yale. David was quick to sign up for Latin classes, wanting to impress his parents. He also started trying to teach himself German by using books in the school’s library, though soon started working with a teacher who spoke German. When he was a sophomore, that same teacher gave him a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, promising that he would get David a German copy once he was far enough along in his German lessons.

When David was sixteen, he was the only one to follow his parents down to their second home in North Carolina that was close to the coast. His siblings had all been flung out across the United States. Frank had moved out to California to work as a doctor in LA, while John was getting his juris doctor at Yale. Both Lillias and Ann had gotten married, settling in Chicago and New Orleans respectively. In the following week and so, his siblings would be arriving in North Carolina to stay in the home with their spouses. Meanwhile, David only had his parents, the radio, the phonograph, and the German work that was supposed to hold him over until he met with his German tutor in the last week of August. The assignment was rather lofty, by his parents’ request in hopes of keeping him out of sight and out of mind. If he were to finish it early, his parents could easily call his tutor to get another lofty assignment. So, he decided to try and take his time on it so he could avoid the scorn of his parents and the threat of another assignment. 

As he worked on the sentences, first translating the words and then constructing the sentences on a separate piece of paper, he heard the radio crackle on in the living room. He could easily hear every word from his perch on the screened in porch. Soon, the Andrew Sisters’ voice drifted out to him.  
“Bei Mir Bist du Schoen, please let me explain/Bei Mir Bist du Schoen means you’re grand.”

Reading over the work, he started to mumble out the words of the song. He had heard it quite a few times on the radio in one of the recreation rooms in his dorm hall, or through his peers singing it with mocking aggrandization. Still, he enjoyed it. As he tapped his foot, he mumbled out, “I could say bella, bella, even sehr wunderbar/Each language only helps me tell you how grand you are”. Though, the song was quickly changed by his parents in hopes of finding the radio news. The radio news always seemed to be droning on in his parents’ home, and they kept old papers in a box in their kitchen. For quite a bit of time, he had always found the news and its repeated stories rather boring. But, as the world started to rapidly change, he wanted to become a journalist. One that broke the news of some absolutely shocking news. Even from a young age, he had wanted to be someone famous and important who was known for his writing talents and the stories that could only come from him. While he had easily shown his parents the elementary stories he wrote as a child, he soon learned to hide them from his parents. He wrote fantastical stories of young men going to war and coming back heroes and meeting pretty girls, of wild expeditions. Of everything he wished to be and never would be. 

When good Americans got blasted to bits by Japanese attacks in Hawaii, David decided that he would become a soldier. That he would be the airborne GI Joe that his brothers could never become. After all, John and Frank were too old now and considered themselves too serious of men to jump from airplanes and to fight in wars that they didn’t create. Meanwhile, David still had glorious and fatalistic ideas of honor and duty. Plus, he thought that he could become the author that he had always dreamed of being. The war reporter that people thought so highly of. The good old boy with the news everyone wanted to read.

Of course, all of those ideas died with the first hit the plane took and the men he saw suspended from trees like puppets frozen in time. His ideas of any permanence died when he returned from the military hospital and so many good Toccoa men were replaced with fresh faced young men who had never drunk or screwed while those left of the Toccoa men were different from those he had trained with for two years. Any hope left of the goodness of man died when the smell of rotting bodies hit his nose as they became the liberators of men who were mere traces of what they must’ve been before the war. 

These moments would play over in his head again and again and again. The crack that shocked the plane sounded so much like when he had accidentally closed the garage door on his father’s car when he was fifteen and had his ass handed to him for it while Frank and John played cards mere feet away, unwilling to defend their younger brother. That smell was too much like the smell of the garden when it would be mulched and fertilized so that David would find another stoop to write at for some days. How could all of these things exist at once? The supposed tranquility of a summer home while men rotted and died. 

In his letters home to his family, always signed ‘Kenyon’ instead of David, he tried to paint a more optimistic picture of the war. Of the honorable men that he served with that died in dozens and the beauty of the German and Austrian country sides as people who had their whole lives destroyed for the religion received the news that the partings at cruel train stations were the last moments they had gotten with spouses and parents and siblings. 

David attempted to act like parts of him hadn’t been destroyed in front of his comrades. In one of her letters, Ann had quoted a Bible passage about forgiveness. Of course, it was easy to forgive when her biggest enemies were yelling toddlers and husbands who hated going to dance halls. It was easy to act like the saint his sister portrayed herself to be when she hadn’t seen the worst of humanity.

He attempted to still Liebgott, to try and end the pain and the suffering of the war as the day that they could go home to their families and attempt to forget everything they had seen. Of course, he knew it was wrong to do after all they had seen. He desperately wanted to think that he could somehow be the hero that the war forbade him from being. Though he never would be, he wanted to be the man that his family was proud of. The man his father would clap on the back and say he was proud of. Like he had many times prior in grammar and boarding school, he allowed his ego and need to feel like he was someone worthwhile get in the way of justice. 

When he arrived home, he had to let himself into the home. David Franke and Joan Webster weren’t there to greet their son. Instead, they had gone out to lunch. As he passed through the parlor to return to whatever was left of his childhood bedroom, he noticed a note on the table. Kenyon was written out in Joan Webster’s beautiful and practiced hand. He picked it up, settling down on a seat by the table. His eyes traced over his mother’s delicately written note.

“Kenyon,  
Your father and I are very proud of you. Be ready for dinner by 6:30.  
Love,  
Mother”

It wasn’t ticker tape parades and horns. But maybe David had gotten enough of that. Pretty girls had seen him in his pink and greens and threw himself at him. When they were in Holland, girls speaking in foreign tongues kissed him and his comrades in gratitude. Mere minutes later, he saw those women again. They had their clothes torn from them and their heads shaved, marking them as traitors and lovers of the enemy. For a moment, he wondered if these women had slept with monsters in hopes of surviving the war. But then he turned the other cheek, refusing to acknowledge any virtues or feelings that they may have had. 

Once he settled in his bedroom, he wondered if he had even deserved any of the congratulations that he had received. He had done so little, after all. David was in a military hospital when Easy Company had won their acclaim in the Battle of the Bulge. He had done nothing heroic but sit and watch and write. Throughout the war he had considered himself a mere observer. David never volunteered himself for anything. He was never a man that would remembered after the heat of battle or one that people would really care for once everything was said and done. 

In the weeks succeeding his return, he and his father took a drive through the New York countryside. For the first and only time, he heard his father say, “I’m proud of you, son”. And though he had waited twenty-three years for it, it wasn’t the moment he thought it would be. Instead of a choir singing and pride filling his chest, he simply turned left to follow the road that traced around the duck pond near his childhood home. It wasn’t the moment that he had dreamed about for years upon years, something that he hoped to hear one day and thought would be some sort of highlight. It passed by as quickly as it came, the older Webster soon telling his son to take a right at a certain point.

Soon enough, his siblings descended upon the family home for Thanksgiving. Frank and John questioned their brother on what he would do, what he would become, if he would do anything with the literature degree that he planned to acquire. Would he become a lawyer or a professor? Of course, he didn’t plan to do anything along those lines. He simply wanted to write. When he admitted to simply wanting to write, his brothers simply exchanged a look. To them, David would never be a professional or a serious man. Instead, he was showing his nescience of the real world.

But how could David know of any real world? All of his life had been defined by prestigious schools that he was not good enough for and a war that had destroyed so many others and had nearly destroyed him. He didn’t get the time that his brothers got. While their twenties were mostly defined by being admirable men who practiced law and medicine and were able to travel the world, the first few years of David’s life had mostly consisted of being woken up in the wee small hours of the morning to worry about his ass being blown to bits. While Frank and John had been able to travel Europe and passively observe seemingly beautiful and charmed countrysides, David had only seen those same lands as they were blown apart and exposed the worst of the people that lived in them.

Years after he had left the war and the men of it behind, after he had already acquired his bachelor’s, he once more questioned what he had done with his life. When women teased his hair with their lithe fingers and he stumbled out of their apartments, he wondered what he was doing. He had achieved many of the things that he wished to achieve when he was a much younger man. And yet, all of it no longer seemed to matter.

He had everything that he had wanted. Webster was finally the known writer that he wanted to be. But what did it matter? What did it matter when the true heroes of the war were buried in shallow graves that no one would ever venture to visit once more? People congratulated him and told him that he was a hero, but it now felt so ingenious. It felt like it didn’t matter when he felt as though he had been a coward who had written through the war instead of actually firing his weapon and defending his fellow soldiers. 

In September of 1961, he went out to sea in hopes of finding another meaning. Of being someone who could discover something that would change the world. But when he most needed someone to come and pull him back in, Frank was all the way across the continent. David could not be a hero, for himself or anyone else. Soon enough, he would disappear into the waves and float forever.


End file.
